


I'd Rather Leave While I'm In Love.

by DaughterofElros



Series: Choice Beyond Control [4]
Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-06
Updated: 2012-03-06
Packaged: 2017-11-01 13:21:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaughterofElros/pseuds/DaughterofElros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Nick is in denial, Juliette calls him out on it, there is wisdom and there are tears, and Nick can begin to move on with his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'd Rather Leave While I'm In Love.

He gets to San Francisco the next morning, early enough that Juliette probably hasn’t left for work. He rings the bell, and she answers, her expression melting from polite interest to shock and joy. The warmth of if brings back some of the happiness that he’s been missing these past few months and he grins.

“Surprise” he says, and she responds by throwing her arms around him in a hug that makes it difficult to breathe. He slides his arms around her slender shoulders, feeling some of the tension that’s been constricting around his heart ease. This is safe, and familiar, and there’s nothing complicated about holding her in his arms. He breathes in the scent of her shampoo and the clean scent of the fancy French soap that she likes so much. After a moment, she steps back, looking at him in amazement.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m taking a few days off.” He says, “I wanted to see you.” She shakes her head.

“If you’d told me, I would have taken some time off too...”

“It’s okay.” He stops her before she can jump into overdrive. “I don’t want to disrupt your life- I just wanted to be here, to see you, and be with you like normal. Go to work. I’ll be here when you get home.

“Only if you promise to take me to lunch.” She tells him, and he grins.

“Deal.” And then he kisses her. She’s expecting a simple peck, but he deepens it, pulls her closer to him, and pours himself into the kiss. When he finally releases her, she’s a little shaky.

“Damn.” She whispers, “You must have _really_ missed me.”

“You have no idea.” He tells her. “How long before you have to leave for work?” he asks, teasing his lips along her earlobe. She glances at the clock on the wall and pulls him down for another kiss.

“I can be twenty minutes late.” She says with the mischievous smile he loves so much.

They’re aiming for the bedroom, but they only make it as far as the kitchen, tugging at each other’s clothing as they go. Juliette manages to free him from his boxers, stroking him with her dainty hand. Nick picks her up and she squeals a little, wrapping her bare legs around his waist as he sets her on the edge of the counter. He can feel the satiny slide of her panties against his straining erection, and he impatiently sweeps them aside. She’s wet for him, and as always, the knowledge enflames him. He positions himself at her entrance, sliding into her tight heat with one smooth thrust.

It’s an incredible sensation, being inside her, and it’s been a long time. He has to pause to collect himself for a second before he begins to move, trying to find just the right pace and angle that makes her catch her breath and release it as a moan. When he finds that pace, he’s relentless, pushing her to two rapid orgasms before he spills inside her. He kisses her breathlessly, trying fiercely to proclaim to himself that this- _she_ \- is what he needs.

A few minutes later, he pours himself a cup of coffee and watches her scurry around the apartment, getting herself together to work. It reminds him of everything he loves about her- her casual grace, the way she can appear poised even when she’s moving frenetically, and the joy with which she faces the world. He kisses her as she heads out the door and promises again to meet her in a few hours for lunch before the door closes and he’s left alone in an apartment which is both familiar and alien populated with artifacts of Juliette’s life before him and their life together but arranged without him.

 

The next few days are a blissful departure from the quite misery Nick has been cultivating over the past several months. They do all the sorts of touristy things that people do- ride the cable cars, take a tour of the city, huddled together for warmth on the top tier of a double decker bus where they have an exceptional view of nothing but fog, and visit the modern art museum. Nick even takes the ferry out to Alcatraz one day while Juliette is at work. They try a few restaurants and stroll through Chinatown where they shop for kitschy souvenirs and visit a fortune cookie factory. They each get a free fortune cookie as they leave. Juliette’s says something about independence. Nick’s reads “There is yet time enough for you to choose a different path.” It’s an unsettling message, and Nick does his best to put it out of his head when they go back to Juliette’s apartment and make love to each other. He completely misses the thoughtful way that Juliette is looking at him as they walk.

He worships her, first with his fingers, and then with his mouth, making her skin flush and her body writhe as she cries out in pleasure time and time again. He takes her to the edge of pleasure and beyond, and only when she’s too weak to move does he finally move to take her, sinking into her and seeking his own gratification.

He wakes up early the next morning and sneaks out to buy some donuts from the store a few blocks north of the apartment. When he returns, Juliette is already awake, dressed, and sitting on the couch in the living room with two cups of coffee steaming on the coffee table. He’s about to offer a cheery good morning, but he gets the sense that something is off. He hesitates, and Juliette speaks instead.

“We should talk.”

“Sure. What about?” he asks, trying to keep the trepidation out of his voice as he sets the box of donuts on the coffee table.

“Why you’re here.”

“I wanted to see you, that’s all.” He says, fixing his expression into an easy smile.”

“Don’t do that Nick.” Juliette says softly. “Don’t hide from me. In the four months that I’ve lived here, you have never just come down for a visit. You never take time off. Last winter, you tried to go to work with a fever and strep throat because you even hate to take sick days. But suddenly you have the time to drive down here in the middle of the week and go sightseeing?” She takes a deep breath. “I called Hank. He told me that you took the entire week off without an explanation. What’s going on?”

Nick is scrambling to come up with something to say, something that makes sense. He starts to protest that nothing’s going on, that he just needed a break, needed to see her, but she cuts him off.

“We’ve been together too long for me not to be able to tell when you’re bullshitting.” There’s no malice in her voice, just calm, reasoned logic. “You’ve been acting strange for a while. Since around the time that your aunt died, really. You started keeping secrets, spending more and more time away from home, and I could handle that. I could actually handle you lying to me, because I knew you thought you were doing it to protect me, because you loved me, and I could forgive that. But right now? You’re lying to yourself, Nick, not just to me. These past couple of days, it hasn’t been about us, or about you wanting to be here. It’s been about you running from something and using me as a shield.”

“Juliette…” He sits forward, leans toward her, but she shakes her head.”

“No. Let me get this off my chest. I love you. I will always love you. And I know how much you love me. But for a long time now, there’s been something else in your life that you love more than that. I don’t know what it is- if it’s your job, or another person, or something else entirely- but there’s something that’s really, really important to you, and it’s overshadowed this relationship for more than a year.”  

“There is nothing that I care about more than you. I-” he catches himself before he can say something that he’ll regret, that will destroy their already fragmenting relationship, like ‘I chose you’ or ‘I left him to stay with you.’ Because she’s more right than she knows. Juliette smiles at him sadly.

“You let me move to San Francisco” she says simply.

“I didn’t want to hold you back!” he protests.

“And I’m so grateful for that.  I love what I’m doing here, and I love this city. But Nick, you can’t pretend that things are the same. We never see each other. We’re not together. Not really, not the way we used to be. We’re moving in different directions, and it’s so unlikely that we’re going to end up meeting up in the same place again. We should recognize that.” Her meaning begins to become clear to him.

“You want to break up.” He says, surprised at how flat his voice sounds to his own ears. Juliette gives him a watery smile.

“We did that four months ago. We just haven’t acknowledged it yet.”

“But… we can make it work. We can try, we can work harder. I love you.”

“We’ve been trying for months, Nick,” she says gently. “Our time is over. We need to accept it and move on while we still love each other, before we each start to resent the other person for holding us back. It’s like that song that says ‘I’d rather leave while I’m in love.’”

Part of him still wants to fight her on this, to insist that they can make it as a couple, but a much larger part of him sees the wisdom of her words, and is grateful that she’s said them. It’s this part of him, the part that’s feeling inexplicably relieved that surprises him the most. All in all though, he’s feeling shell-shocked. He’s astonished to realize that she’s right, and much as it hurts, he’s been subconsciously preparing himself for this. He can find peace in this decision.

“So…what do we… where do we go from here?”

“We say our goodbyes, we have our last hurrah, and then we figure out how to be friends,” she tells him simply, reaching out to entwine her fingers with his. She kisses him then, soft and bittersweet and he allows himself to be swept away in the moment. They end up making love one last time, an erotic farewell that leaves them both in tears. Nick refuses to reflect on how familiar he’s getting with goodbye sex.

He packs his things afterward, and Juliette helps. She follows him out to the car when he leaves. They embrace on the sidewalk and he kisses her again, struggling with the idea that this is truly goodbye.

“I never meant for things to turn out this way,” he apologizes. She squeezes his hand and tells him,

“I know.” Then she looks him in the eye and says, quite honestly, “When you figure it out- when your life starts making sense again, call me and fill me in.” Nick is struck by how she always seems to know him better than he knows himself. As he drives away, watching her wave in the rearview mirror, he realizes that that may be a major part of the problem- his life has become chaos, and he isn’t sure what he wants. Except that isn’t precisely true. He knows what he wants. He’s known for a while. He just hasn’t admitted it, doesn’t think he’ll be able to have it. And after the colossal mess he’s made of things, he knows he definitely doesn’t deserve it.

**Author's Note:**

> We will return to our regularly scheduled M/M programming in subsequent chapters. But, as several of you have pointed out, Nick has been exceedingly unfair to everyone, and Juliette deserved a chance to stand up, be strong, and end things with him on her own terms. She's a very strong character in my book, and I thought that this is the way she would end things- give them a final chance and then say goodbye gracefully in a very "We'll always have Paris" sort of way.


End file.
